How long does it take to read What Is World Literature??
What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch takes about 5 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 56 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2003. 324 pages, about 89,100 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 54 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 43 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What is world literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Mench's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators.
Subjects: Translating and interpreting, History and criticism, Canon (Literature), Literature, history and criticism
